I'm slowly wondering if Apple has lost their senses with Photo app. It just fails to do the basics.
One would expect a easy import of photos. No way the photos have to be sorted into bursts, movies, etc. But in reality what happened to the "events" where photos were grouped in a human logical manner ?
Then comes the photo stream; yeah its cool; but then you don't really understand where the photo is you want to archive. As photo stream will happily delete old photos. So you think you have them but you don't.
And so forth.
Adding functionality to photos is sure a good thing; but maybe it should be robust and ambiguity free on the basics; that is simple archiving of photographs. The rest is pure add-on.
I've been resisting replying; feel like a fish swimming upstream. I far prefer Photos to iPhoto.
First off, if you haven't already, go to the View menu > Show Sidebar - makes Photos far more iPhoto/Aperture-like.
Believe it or not, the Photos library organizes its image files under the hood (inside the Library database package) the same way iPhoto did - file system folders organized by Year, Month, Day, and individual import session. That's what you'll see if you Get Info for the Photos library and Show Package Contents. Very, very logical. Very close to the way most of the "I need to organize my image files my way" people want to do it.
Yeah, Photos doesn't have Events, it only has Albums. Events were just special-purpose Albums. You could import images into Events, you couldn't import them into Albums. A photo could only be in one Event, but it can be in multiple Albums. By default, Events were organized by date and import session, which mirrored the way things were organized inside the library.
In Photos they replaced those default Events with the Years/Collections/Moments views - it still makes it dead simple to find images by date, which for my money was the only thing iPhoto Events were good for. I always used Albums when I needed to categorize my images - my categories almost always transcend a single Import.
So, you want a container in Photos that represents an entire Import? You can create an Album for that. As long as you don't delete any images from that Album, it's no different than having them in an Event. And if you do accidentally delete something from that Album? Go back to the Year/Collections/Moments view.
Bursts, Movies, Panoramas, Selfies... they're just ready-made Smart Albums. Search engine results. "Show me all the Panoramas." Multiple, easy ways to find the images you're looking for. Don't look for things that way? Ignore them. They only appear in the sidebar if you have photos that fit those categories. Meantime, the files that contain those indexed search engine results are very small - not a waste of space, not a waste of time.
For my money, Bursts, Movies, Panoramas, Selfies... all logical, human ways to organize things. Sometimes I want to show off a particular Pano - it's a hell of a lot easier to look in the Panoramas album than to scan through the other 150 shots I took that day. I very rarely want to keep Selfies or Screenshots... they're identified and gone in seconds.
Now, I often shoot with multiple cameras - a single "import" does not represent a day's shoot. I consolidate all images from that shoot into a single Album, or if the shoot encompassed multiple locations, I might sort them by location, inside a Folder dedicated to the shoot. I often make a Smart Album for Favorites from that shoot (if you don't know how to create Smart Albums... I recommend you learn how - very easy, very useful)... By the way, Smart Albums were part of iPhoto, too.
Photo Stream works no differently in Photos than it did in iPhoto (or Aperture). If you setup iPhoto/Aperture/Photos Preferences to automatically import your Photo Stream images (normally from your iPhone/iPad), then they're saved to your Mac. They're deleted from iCloud after a month, but the point is, if they've been saved to your Mac, why waste space in iCloud? Think of Photo Stream as a temporary conveyor belt... if you don't take the stuff off the belt in time, it falls into the trash bin at the end of the belt. (The difference with Photos is that it does not create Events for your automatic Photo Stream imports - you find them in the Year/Collection/Moments or All Photos views, and put 'em into whatever Album you want.)
If you want your images to
stay in iCloud, turn on iCloud Photo Library, and start paying Apple monthly for additional storage space. Just understand that, if you do that, anything you delete from your iPhone will also be deleted from your Mac.
The fundamental difference between iPhoto/Aperture and Photos is this: Photos supports iCloud Photo Library, those other apps don't. They might have redesigned iPhoto and Aperture to be compatible, but the under-the-hood changes would have been huge. So they started from scratch, changed the name, and pissed everyone off. Bottom line, if you don't want/need iCloud Photo Library, keep using iPhoto or Aperture if it makes you happier.
